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Digital society sucks, and to a degree modern society in general. There used to be religion, which you may dislike, but it offered social bonding at scale. You

by fleddr 4y ago

Digital society sucks, and to a degree modern society in general. There used to be religion, which you may dislike, but it offered social bonding at scale. You'd get to known an entire community, neighborhood, might make new friends or even find a spouse. Learn about people hobbies and form sub communities. Or you go to school. Or to work, where before globalization you'd have a stable local team that you'd get to know very deeply. Or you may go to a bar, a hobby club, and attend public places for shopping, entertainment, whichever. Now you wake up and the first thing you do is check your phone. Next, you may learn or work remotely, sitting alone, watching a screen breathing low quality air. You don't go to a store, you use delivery. You use your little work breaks to watch another screen, the smartphone. After dinner, there's more screen time. Passive entertainment, doomscrolling or interacting with a "community", weird little avatars on a screen. You don't even have a relation with objects either. In the digital world, you don't really own anything. There's no stability. It's all fleeting, flexible, disrupted, empty. That's increasingly the dominant lifestyle: void. The world is entirely financialized, hence you don't really live in a society, it's performance culture. You're expected to juggle 10 balls from an early age, which are life's "expectations". It offers no time for discovery, play or recovery. You need to check the damn boxes. The reward of mastering the boxes is that well actually...you still can't afford a basic middle class existence. The financial system constantly rug-pulls you whilst technology constantly disrupts your relevance. Am I dramatizing? Yes, somewhat. But I sincerely mean it when I say that life used to better. We lost a lot.

sammalloy 4y ago
> I sincerely mean it when I say that life used to better. If there is anything I’ve learned in my old age, it’s that things were not better in the past. And while I don’t accept Steven Pinker’s optimistic claims about the fruits of progress as much as other people do, I think he makes a good baseline argument regarding how much progress we have made over the last century. It’s just that we have so much farther to go and that seems overwhelming at times, at least to me. There’s a common cognitive bias known as nostalgia or rosy retrospection that makes people think the past was better, as well as any number of psych studies showing how this works and why people do it. The most common example is of a parent who only remembers the good times while their children remember the bad. I won’t bore you with the details, but you can look into this phenomenon for yourself. With that said, you have listed some legitimate complaints about negative societal changes that have occurred over the last thirty years. That doesn’t mean or imply that everything was better in the past, but it would be accurate to say that some things have gotten worse while other things have gotten better, but mostly, humanity has achieved some measure of progress that makes even the most recent past look barbaric, IMO. We have this idea in our head that progress and advancement and the uplifting of humanity (and its relationship with nature) should be neat and orderly, when in reality it’s extremely messy, gruesome, and violent, much like the labor pains of a woman giving birth. If you were an alien and had never seen a human giving birth, you might think the mother to be was being attacked or suffering from a disease. I think progress is a little bit like that. Its appearance looks like chaos and suffering and pain, but the end result is a new form of life, a new form of living. That’s what we are experiencing. I personally believe it is a dangerous error to believe the past was better, because it prevents people from looking towards a better future, as they seek to repeat the same mistakes from the past, over and over again, endlessly seeking a Golden Age that never was. The other problem with looking in the rear view mirror, is that you neglect working to improve the present, which inevitably informs all future progress. If we are looking backwards, then we are neglecting the present and its subsequent future, so we have to be wary and cautious about people who tell us that things were better in the past, as it tends to impose a false historical mythology on the past, present, and future, disrupting the timeline of progress in all directions.

by fleddr 4y ago

sammalloy 4y ago

> I sincerely mean it when I say that life used to better. If there is anything I’ve learned in my old age, it’s that things were not better in the past. And while I don’t accept Steven Pinker’s optimistic claims about the fruits of progress as much as other people do, I think he makes a good baseline argument regarding how much progress we have made over the last century. It’s just that we have so much farther to go and that seems overwhelming at times, at least to me. There’s a common cognitive bias known as nostalgia or rosy retrospection that makes people think the past was better, as well as any number of psych studies showing how this works and why people do it. The most common example is of a parent who only remembers the good times while their children remember the bad. I won’t bore you with the details, but you can look into this phenomenon for yourself. With that said, you have listed some legitimate complaints about negative societal changes that have occurred over the last thirty years. That doesn’t mean or imply that everything was better in the past, but it would be accurate to say that some things have gotten worse while other things have gotten better, but mostly, humanity has achieved some measure of progress that makes even the most recent past look barbaric, IMO. We have this idea in our head that progress and advancement and the uplifting of humanity (and its relationship with nature) should be neat and orderly, when in reality it’s extremely messy, gruesome, and violent, much like the labor pains of a woman giving birth. If you were an alien and had never seen a human giving birth, you might think the mother to be was being attacked or suffering from a disease. I think progress is a little bit like that. Its appearance looks like chaos and suffering and pain, but the end result is a new form of life, a new form of living. That’s what we are experiencing. I personally believe it is a dangerous error to believe the past was better, because it prevents people from looking towards a better future, as they seek to repeat the same mistakes from the past, over and over again, endlessly seeking a Golden Age that never was. The other problem with looking in the rear view mirror, is that you neglect working to improve the present, which inevitably informs all future progress. If we are looking backwards, then we are neglecting the present and its subsequent future, so we have to be wary and cautious about people who tell us that things were better in the past, as it tends to impose a false historical mythology on the past, present, and future, disrupting the timeline of progress in all directions.